Hey all, I have a Neoware Eon 100 that I am attempting to get working as a diskless frontend. I have hooked an external usb cd-rom to it, and it works great when you boot from the knoppmyth R5F1 cd. So to make a completely silent front end I am attempting to setup diskless boot. I have ran the script:

knoppmyth_diskless_frontend.bash

But during the second phase of the script I get this message:

Unable to automatically determine the MAC address of the current default frontend by interrogating /var/log/daemon.log. This may be because you have not yet booted the diskless FE. You can either boot the diskless FE and try running /user/local/bin/knoppmyth_diskless_frontend.bash again, or delete /nfsfoot/eon and re-create it later.


If you look at /var/log/daemon.log:


I have verified that the MAC is correct. The DHCP successfully works with other systems. The Eon just sits there with a "Sending DHCP requests . . . "

I am really new at this so anywhere else I can look for logs or other hints? Does anybody know what may be the problem? Anything else I can attempt?

Hrm, looks like the client is being offered the 192.168.11.26 address by the server, but it doesn't like it, it should be sending a DHCPREQUEST immediately. You could try setting up a static IP via dhcp using the the host parameter with dhcpd.conf just to test it out;



looking something like;



Just make sure the fixed-address is outside your range of dynamically allocated address.

Hrm, thinking of that have you allocated enough range for all clients on your network? Probably have otherwise the server wouldn't be offering.

Bad cable perhaps?

Some ideas anyways.

Regards,
Kirk.

Thanks for the suggestions Kirk.

I modified the dhcpd.conf file statically setting it to .18. It sort of helped same problem on the client, but more info in the logs:



The DHCPDISCOVER and DHCPOFFER just continue:

Thanks everyone.

I'm not sure why the client doesn't want to use DHCP, but anyways. The client seems to be setting the IP correctly when connecting to the tftp server so we'll run with that.

Where is the client actually booting up to? It seems you had a good 9 seconds between the last ACK and another DISCOVER so I'm presuming it's actually trying to boot the image?

I had a look through the knoppmyth_diskless_frontend.bash script and I noticed that when it creates the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file that it tries to set the client to use DHCP again when loading the kernel.



Try changing that to



at least that's what we use here at work when booting knoppix over PXE and NFS. Otherwise you could try ip=192.168.11.18, but then you'd be limited to one frontend, or you'd have to create different profiles for each MAC.

Good luck,
Kirk.

No luck, but I do have new info. on the Client I get the following: (forgive me having to type this over, can't figure out how to copy/paste from the client.)



Thanks!

Error 101 means the network is unreachable.

I'm thinking something's up with your server.. is portmap daemon running?

Is /nfsroot/eon exported in /etc/exports?

Thanks Kirk. I looked at netstat and the box is listening on 111, but I went ahead and restarted portmap.

The following line is in my /etc/exports


Unfortunately, no change on the client. Any other thoughts? I really appreciate all of the help so far.

Ok, that looks fine.. you can confirm that it is actually exporting properly using another box, or a live CD or something.

I'm thinking it's still about the IP stuff, cause the client actually gets the IP twice during boot, once when it connects to the DHCP server, and once again when it loads up the kernel.. and I think it's dropping it here.

Can you show us the /nfsroot/pxelinux.cfg/default file and/or 00-e0-c5-59-61-c3 file please?

We'll figure it out soon enough!

Hey all sorry for the delay -- life interrupted for awhile.

I tried a Dell GX150 and that sort of worked as a client so I am guessing that the export is working.

here is the contents of the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file



Thanks.[/code]

Gee, I'm starting to run out of ideas, heh.

Let's try explicitly setting the IP and all the other parameters so that it shouldn't need any DHCP. Change your default file to;


IP notation is the following;

The three colons afterwards are important.

Fingers crossed!

Kirk thanks for all your help, it did not appear to work but it did change the output on the client


Does this spark any ideas?

I plugged "eth0: Transmit timed out, status 0003, PHY status 786d, resetting. . . " into google and found a couple of references of it leading to a possible IRQ problem.

A couple of people tried adding "noapic" or "acpi=noirq" or "pci=noacpi" to the APPEND line and it worked with various successes. Another said he disabled SATA in the BIOS and it worked.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=492159

Try pumping a couple of the other errors into google as well and see if you can come up with anything more concrete. It could be a kernel issue, or perhaps a driver issue?

Dunno if you could fit a different network card in those things?

Good luck!